This is the last piece in David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules. He introduces the essay by pointing out that his OWS buddies got arrested for blocking one bridge while five days later Chris Nolan got to close a different one for two days to shoot a movie. Well yeah, David, they asked permission.
Nonetheless, it does cover a lot of the tropes that bug me about superheroes in general, and therefore effectively all filmed entertainment out of Hollywood right now.
It always pisses me off how they ticket a homeless person for blocking a sidewalk but are more than willing to block those same sidewalks for more than a year for construction. It shows how this town values capital over citizens (that is if you value homeless people as people).
What happens when a hard right creator is left to invent his own character embodying his political philosophy with no checks on his control? You get a character no one likes or cares about And the creator just sorta runs and hides from a world that rejected him for his desire to create boring stories. What happens when a right leaning director is given creative control of a film franchise and universe that inherently leans towards moral absolutism? You get the only recent superhero movie I've turned off after ten minutes What happens when an art student fails in the middle of a cultural zeitgeist between two massive world conflicts? He becomes history's greatest villain. By pouring his passion instead into rhetoric and careful image manipulation. I'm not saying there's a straight line from Hitler through Ditko to Zack Snyder. I'm saying we should, and do to an extent, look at these parallels and notice the common connections. I like the article. I don't agree with the author 100% on everything but he was on to something.
I tend to balance Graeber out with Niall Ferguson.. I followed up The Utopia of Rules with The Square in the Tower